Disparate technical and business objectives can make it difficult for businesses and other entities (“institutions”) to store and safeguard large volumes of data. For example, the software and hardware applications servicing an institution's primary storage system may need to provide redundancy across different hardware platforms, determine appropriate timings for the storage and retrieval of data, and allocate data in a structured manner. These technical considerations can also be complicated by business objectives. For example, where the organization deals in sensitive personal information it may be necessary for definitive measures for erasing data in storage to be readily available.
Optical data storage systems provide some benefits that may address various of these technical and business needs. For example, an optical disk may not require any power until it is placed into an optical disk drive (“drive”) so that data can be read or written. However, successful integration of optical storage into an operational database system demands that the nuances of the optical storage and the existing storage systems be fully considered.
For example, success regularly depends upon the harmonious integration of factors such as data retention policies, privacy policies, storage operations, encoding protocols, etc. Rather than joining disparate collections of tools at different levels of abstraction, an optical storage system would ideally synthesize these elements for a common purpose. Typical optical storage systems fail to provide this integrated functionality or to achieve the consequent efficiency gains.
While the flow and sequence diagrams presented herein show an organization designed to make them more comprehensible by a human reader, those skilled in the art will appreciate that actual data structures used to store this information may differ from what is shown, in that they, for example, may be organized in a different manner; may contain more or less information than shown; may be compressed and/or encrypted; etc.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Further, the drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be expanded or reduced to help improve the understanding of the embodiments. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.